The Huawei Mate S Review

Conclusion

As we're coming to the conclusion, I'm left with mixed feelings in regards to the Mate S. In terms of design, this has been by far Huawei's best device to date. The vendor has managed to update or to improve in all aspects of phablet design: aesthetics, ergonomics and build quality. In terms of aesthetics, Huawei didn't veer off too much from their design language found in past devices. The Mate S is very much recognizable as being part of the Mate series, yet improves by doing little alterations such as the speaker repositioning or the new circular designs of the camera lens and fingerprint sensors. In terms of ergonomics the new more rounded design of the back along with the chamfered edges and 2.5D glass make this also Huawei's most comfortable phone to date.

One aspect that can't be shared with pictures and that is hard to describe is the phone's build quality. Gone are the plastic antenna covers found on the Mate 7 or the what seemed to be a very thinly built metal uni-body of the P8. The Mate S is among of the the most solid devices I've come across and seems to be worthy of being positioned in the premium flagship segment. In fact, during a group lunch on a recent Huawei media trip to China, were asked us what we thought was Huawei's best built device to date, and among all editors present at the table we all seemed to unanimously deemed this to be the Mate S.

So while there's a lot of praise in terms of the device's externals, it's also what is inside what matters. And here is where we discovered some worrying issues with the Mate S. First, bridging the external with the internals is the device's screen. While the new AMOLED screen brings large image quality improvements to Huawei's line-up, it's also lacking in accuracy and realistic colors. While this may be a subjective matter for a lot of users, and in fact there may very well be a lot of users who prefer the more saturated colors of the larger color gamut calibration, it's on the efficiency side where the Mate S's display panel drastically falls behind. Coming in at almost half the white luminance efficiency of a traditional LCD display, the device battery life suffers from employing what seems to be a cheaper and more inefficient AMOLED emitter material / panel.

In fact, it seems that the device's battery life is being hindered on three different fronts. Besides the inefficient display, the device sports a what is rather small 2700mAh battery for a 5.5" form factor device. The third factor is the Kirin 930 SoC. As detailed on the CPU power consumption section, the SoC seems to suffer from a rather worrying behavior due to an inefficient clocking architecture of the memory controllers. While the high clocked A53's perf/W efficiency curves don't fall all that far behind SoCs such as the Snapdragon 801, if one accounts the overhead due to the memory controller it brings it down to levels even below that of the Snapdragon 808 or 810 which is unfortunate. All in all, the Mate S is severely disappointing in terms of battery life.

In terms of performance, we actually saw some improvements due to the slightly higher clock of the CPU as well tweaking of the DVFS mechanisms. In every-day usage slow-downs are not noticeable although performance is also not too great and can't be compared to devices with more powerful SoCs. Consistently adequate would be a good term in defining the Mate S's performance. Of course this only applies to non-gaming performance as the device's GPU is very prone to throttling and again sports some unsatisfactory battery efficiency due to this fact.

Camera-wise the Mate S behaves a bit better than the P8 due to the improved behavior and white balance processing. Again, while this can be deemed a good camera, Huawei still has some work to do to make it as good as the competition's offerings.  While I didn't write it up in a dedicated section, the Mate S is also plagued by extremely disappointing WiFi performance due to an aging BCM4334 WiFi chipset and bad antenna performance, which even lacks the capability for 5GHz bands that can be a deal-breaker for some consumers.

Software-wise, I don't have much to add as we didn't see many changes compared to the P8 or previous EmotionUI iterations. The task-switcher is still cumbersome and the device's application killing mechanisms such as the power-manager are a tad too aggressive and I wish the default settings would leave these options turned off. Otherwise I'm still very fond of EmotionUI's general aesthetics as it's one of the better looking OEM skins out there. The fingerprint sensor is among the best in the business and it also offers added functionality that we can't find on any other device.

This brings us back to my initial feeling of the device, which is say a mixed one. The Mate S is an extremely attractive device that easily holds up to the competition in terms of design and build-quality. Unfortunately the Mate S was launched a at a very high MSRP of 649€ for the 32GB version. Since then it seems the price has fallen to about 500-550€ at the time of writing, which is still a considerable amount. Here's where we fall back to the question as to why the Mate S came to be in the first place. What seems to have happened is the Mate 8 couldn't make the usual September launch due to the Kirin 950 not being ready for manufacturing, so Huawei managed to create a off-shoot of the Mate series as a stop-gap solution.

In the end I'm not sure if that was all that great of a decision for costumers as the Mate S carries a lot of the more crippling aspects of previous Huawei flagships.  The big "killer" feature of the Mate S was supposed to be the touted force-touch capability, but with that variant of the phone not being released until next year it leaves the rest of the lineup with sort of a lack of direction and purpose. A SoC is crucial to the performance and efficiency of a device and HiSilicon's offerings were simply not as competitive compared to chipsets from Qualcomm or Samsung. I can't help but think that this would have been a great device if Huawei had opted for a higher efficiency screen and also waited until the Kirin 950 was ready. Unfortunately that's not how it played out and thus I would rather recommend for users to wait for the Mate 8, or if that form factor is too big, to look at other competing devices. Still, Huawei is moving forward one step at a time with great potential and I'm looking forward to their next device.